MARCUS Bent is desperate to give Blues a boost by recreating the razor-sharp goalscoring form he produced for the Blades ten years ago.

Alex McLeish’s men head to Bramall Lane today to take on a Sheffield United side who are hunting a place in the Championship’s play-offs.

The trip to Yorkshire will evoke happy memories for Bent who spent arguably his finest years as a footballer with the red and white half of the Steel City.

Bent rattled in 24 goals during a 14-month spell with United which spanned 56 appearances before being snapped up by Blackburn Rovers for £2 million in November 2000.

Since then the well-travelled forward has been struggling to show the same prolificacy for the seven clubs that followed.

As things stand, the 30-year-old’s Blues record is far from impressive - just three goals in 31 appearances, but he’s willing for that to change in the near future.

And as the ex-England Under-21 international prepares to return to the stomping ground where he produced his finest form, there will be no better place to start than at Bramall Lane.

“Sheffield United was a really good time for me. We had a lot of good young pros with the likes of Michael Brown, Phil Jagielka and Paul Devlin, who Blues fans will know well,” recalled Bent.

“It was a good battling team, full of goalscorers and we just missed out on the play-offs. They were good memories as that was one of my best scoring spells. I think I hit 17 in a season and that was down to me getting a lot of opportunities from midfield and crosses into the box - all that made it quite easy for me.

“I was working under Kevin Blackwell, who is there now, and Neil Warnock and my time there is easily up there with my favourites. It was a great spell and a nice area to live.

“It would be brilliant to get back to those ways for Blues. It’s been frustrating for everyone and definitely for myself. I like to always perform at my highest level and if I don’t then it gets frustrating. It’s something that I’m born with but I just want to be a winner and be as good as I can.

‘‘I haven’t had as much of a run in the team as I would have liked because there’s a lot of quality strikers at the club.”

When it comes to goalscoring droughts, Bent is not alone at St Andrew’s as, apart from injured top scorer Kevin Phillips, the rest of Blues’ flock of forwards are struggling to find the onion bag.

Blues boss McLeish has issued a string of rallying cries in recent weeks for his strikers to do what they should do best and has even lay down personal targets of at least eight goals by the end of the season. So far it has fallen on deaf ears as highlighted by Tuesday’s goalless draw at Crystal Palace when a host of sitters were wasted.

But Bent insists that him and his fellow hungry goal-getters have taken Big Eck’s message on board and are doing all they can to ease the manager’s headache.

“Everyone else is hearing what the manager is saying. Kevin Phillips has scored a number of goals but now it is up to us others to bash them out and start producing a bit more as well.

“There’s no excuse for us, we’re working as hard as we can. We’re still second but we’ve still not hit what I would call top flight football. There’s still 12 games to go but we can’t keep talking about it.

“We didn’t come away with the win at Crystal Palace but we created a lot of chances so that gives us a lot of positives going into Sheffield United.

‘‘I already know that the Blades fans are very passionate and it will be a physical challenge up there.”

Today’s match-up will be a time to reflect for Blues as Sheffield United were the opposition who their promotion-chasing campaign began against.

On that occasion at St Andrew’s back in August, it took a last-gasp Phillips strike to settle the affair.

Bent admits that despite the club’s stumbles since then, they will all be forgotten should Blues achieve their aim of Premier League football next season.

“For the first half of the season I thought we deserved to be beaten with some of our performances but that’s football, it works in mysterious ways.

The table doesn’t lie and if we end up getting promotion then nobody will have anything bad to say - there will be no boos.

“We’re working hard in training and we can’t be any fitter than what we are.”